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I recently came across a couple of links that I wanted to share. They do a great job of explaining the basics of making social media work for you in your job search.

The first is from Mashable, and does a good job of explaining why you should use social media.

The second is from New Grad Life, and has a lot of tips and tricks to help maximize your social network, as well as how to expand it.

You would be really surprised by how much difference connections can make in getting a foot in the door. Even as a new college graduate I was able to network with friends who had just started with companies that were looking for more young employees, and even one friend who landed an HR job with Microsoft. So keep at it, and use those networks!!

One of my good friends is a journalism graduate and shared the Jobs Page blog with me. Although much of the information is tailored to journalism graduates, there is plenty of general resources as well. It’s definitely worth a look!

Although I think I think salary negotiations are focused on too much, at least for new college graduates applying to their first “real” job, I came across Salary Tutor recently and thought it provided a lot of valuable information. You can check out the site here.

This post is dedicated to all the college students out there who are near graduation (less than 1 year remaining before the big day). The strategies for college seniors to improve their employability and career stock is a lot different than a college freshman for example. (If you have more than a year before graduation, try reading this post).

For better or worse, for this moment in time you are who you are. You can’t significantly change your GPA or get any more work experience–you simply don’t have enough time. But that’s OK. The one thing you can do to give yourself an advantage is to out prepare the competition. Here’s a few tips about how to differentiate yourself in your final months in college.

GPA

If you read the previous post written for those who have at least a year before they’ll graduate, you already know what I’m going to say here, namely, that your grades are the number one thing that employers look at. That isn’t to say if you don’t have a 4.0, you can’t get a job. You most assuredly can. However, your situation is a little different than those that have more time until they graduate. You do NOT have enough time to significantly alter your cumulative GPA.

However, you may have enough time to show positive trends in your academic performance and alter the GPA of a subset of your classes such as senior-level classes or classes within your specialization. You should concentrate on ending your academic career on a positive note and focus on emphasizing this upward grade swing when applying to jobs. So, in an interview you might want to highlight this by saying something like, “Although I struggled early on in college and only achieved a 2.8 GPA going into my senior year, I was able to focus and achieve a 3.4 GPA in my 400-level classes.” You can go on to highlight what brought about this improvement—finding classes you were passionate about, gaining maturity, reading this amazing blog post 😉 , etc., and then, if possible, linking that attribute back to the position in a way that demonstrates why you’re the right person for the job (it shows maturity, ability to spot your weaknesses, initiative, whatever).

On your resume you can highlight your improvment by borrowing a trick from one of my other posts and use a dual-GPA strategy on your resume that may look something like this:

GPA: 2.96; senior-level GPA 3.41

Volunteer Experience

I said in an earlier post that if you have more than one year until you graduate you should focus on work experience. This is generally not true with less than one year, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First, with less than a year left it is difficult and impractical to try to acquire meaningful work experience. Most internships and co-ops take place during the summer and it is extremely difficult to get such a position during the school year. That being said, if you do have the opportunity to partake in an internship opportunity I would fully endorse doing so.

The second reason is that volunteering offers quick ways to demonstrate key skills that employers look for in job applicants, most notably leadership and teamwork. So while it is quite unlikely you will, say have an internship managing a team of 10 coworkers, it is quite easy to find volunteer experience which allows you to immediately jump into such a role.

There is one thing to note which is that when listing volunteer experience on your resume employers will obviously be able to determine the approximate date when you started and if you suddenly became “Mr. or Mrs. Volunteer Activity” in your final quarter or two it may ring insincere with them. One way to counteract this is to face it head on. A simple statement like the following will work wonders during your interview, “While researching your company 2 months ago when starting my job search I noticed that leadership skills are a key component of a successful applicant. After evaluating my own background, I noticed I had a hole in this skill set which led me to seek a leadership position with a volunteer organization to address this weakness area before graduation.”

But remember, not all companies are created equal, some may be more interested in leadership, others in team work, or facilitation skills, or even a particular knowledge set. The point is to combine a volunteer experience that you’re passionate about with one that will fortify the core competencies desired by your potential employers given your time constraints before graduation.

There is no secret about how to go about finding a volunteer opportunity (craigslist, school job boards, churches, etc.) and it might take a few hours of research, but is well worth the effort.

Student Government

Student government offers another opportunity to gain internship-type experience closer to home. Student organizations differ from school to school, but here again leadership opportunities are often in no short supply. For those who are interested in a career in the corporate world, many schools often have some sort of student run businesses such as a school paper, radio station, any one of a number of different types of stores, community development programs, etc.

Research

Undergraduate student research is yet another great way to quickly differentiate yourself from your peers. At many universites research opportunities are available all year round and in nearly every academic discipline. In most cases you will be assisting a graduate student or professor in whatever research project they are currently undertaking. Undergraduate research not only gives you practical and unique experience, but also shows your passion for your academic major.

This will just be a quick post to give a few small tips regarding resume submission when completing an online application. There are basically two types of submission methods used depending on the company. Some companies offer a direct way to browse, select, and upload your resume in Microsoft Word (or a similar) format. This is easy enough, my advice would be the same as if you were submitting a hardcopy resume (See my list of Resume Tips articles for more information).

So let’s focus on the other form of resume submission. This common method requires you to submit your resume in text format via a text entry box. Companies like this submission process because it allows the information to be dumped into the company’s own database which optimizes keyword search and resume review.

2) Consider replacing bolded headings (which won’t show up in a plain text format) with all capitalized headings to help segment your text resume.

3) Simplify your resume’s formatting so that all lines are left aligned.

4) Add extra info. As you may know I am a big advocate of the one-page resume for most recent graduates. The online resume submission, however, does allow you to “cheat” and add a little extra information to your resume since there is no idea of a “page” in text format. Be cautious however, the fundamental philosophy of a susinct and powerful resume still holds. Click here for a post on the reason for a one-page resume.

5) Try it out first! Have a copy of your resume available in text format so that you can simply cut and paste when filling out online applications.

This post is dedicated to those students who have a year or more left before they graduate from university. For those that have less than a year, I’ll be writing a post for you soon.

In this post I’ll rank the key areas of focus in order of importance. These rankings are not absolute and we’ll talk about some of the exceptions as we move forward, but all things being equal this is how I would rank them.

GPA

Work Experience

Research

Volunteer Experiences

Study abroad opportunities

Let’s break this down a little further:

GPA

For better or worse your grades are the number one factor influencing employers (at least on paper). That isn’t to say if you don’t have a 4.0, you can’t get a job. You most assuredly can. But if you have 1 year or more left in your college career, you have enough time to significantly alter your GPA. More importantly you have the chance to establish a strong upward trend in your academic performance. So although you may not be able to say “I have a 3.8 cumulative GPA.” What you might be able to say is, “Although I struggled early on in college and only achieved a 2.8 GPA going into my last year and a half of college, I was able to focus and achieve an overall GPA of 3.4 in my final two years.”

It is also important to note that your GPA is the only piece of your application that has minimum requirements for some entry-level positions. Often times I have seen companies who require a 3.0, 3.2, or 3.5 GPA to apply for a particular position. This is not true of work experience, volunteer experience, undergraduate research, etc. So, while your lack of work experience or research may inhibit your application, your GPA can, in a very real way, completely exclude you from particular positions.

The final reason to focus on your GPA is more of a philosophical one. You are going to college to learn and your GPA is as good a measure as is readily available of your success in learning the target subjects. Volunteering is good for the planet and work experience provides professional self-enrichment, but you are not going to school to work. You are in school to learn, so that later in life, namely after you graduate, then you can begin a career. Someone is paying a lot for your education, maybe your parents or a family member, maybe the government, maybe yourself, but either way your time in class is being paid for. Do your best to respect yourself and your personal academic pursuits and the parties that are paying for your education.

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Work Experience

Work experience is the next most beneficial item for boosting your application. Although, a terrific research opportunity or volunteer experience may be worth giving up an internship or co-op for, work experience inherently offers something the other two options can not—a chance to work in the “real” world. The chance to earn a paycheck. The chance to be a legal member of a corporation or non-profit and have the responsibilities that go with that position.

Work experience is also the most practical of the areas I’m discussing here. The reasons are obvious—if you are looking to work at a corporation or non-profit after graduation, what better way to prepare than working for one of those entities before graduation. Make the most of your internships and co-ops, taking on extra responsibility when possible, turning in only the highest quality work, and doing as networking as possible.

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Volunteer Experience

I am a big fan of volunteer experience, and I think it only becomes more important and applicable as your time in university diminishes. My belief is based on the wide array of so-called “soft skills” (leadership, teamwork, etc.) than can be gained while volunteering. Many of these skills and experiences are highly sought after by employers and are one of the key components they look for in work experience that we discussed above. Work experience often has the benefit of being more relevant, however volunteer experience has the advantage that it is often more accessible. Given a year or more, it is not at all uncommon to be able to lead multiple major projects, one every few months or so, at one or more community organizations in your neighborhood. These projects don’t have to be complex, leading a park cleanup, organizing a food drive, or helping to make partnerships with new clients are all exceedingly valuable experiences that will really make your application stand out when recruiting season comes. So start talking to organizations in your area and see what leadership roles that have now, or in the near future that you can hop aboard.

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Research

Research has both benefits and drawbacks. Because research takes place in the academic environment it offers a great chance for personal enrichment in a particular area of academics. Indeed most research projects involve very specific investigation and experiments in search of an answer to a specific hypothesis. This narrow focus, benefits the student by making them a subject matter expert, at least in principle, on a particular topic. But because of this specificity, the broader subject knowledge and body of skills used in a typical entry-level position in a corporation are not developed.

This has to be weighed against one’s ultimate career goals. For some, who hope to go back to graduate school or get a post in a research laboratory or academic facility, research may be the most important experience to acquire while getting an undergraduate education. However, for most students that is not the case, and in general an undergraduate research post does not offer the practicality and breadth of experience as more traditional internship or co-op work experience.

That being said some school’s research programs partner with outside organizations in more of a joint approach. If this is the case, especially if the collaborative program is with one of your companies of interest, you should well consider this opportunity as one of the most valuable available to you as an undergraduate.

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Study Abroad

Studying abroad is a great opportunity, especially if it incorporates a language component. However, from an academic point of view, these experiences still amount to you attending classes at a university which has no more value than what you would have been doing if you stayed at your home university.

There may be exceptions to this rule depending on the company or field you want to work for. For example, if you know in your heart of hearts that you want to work for a company in Italy or with a company with very close ties to Italy, then a study abroad experience in Italy may well be worth its weight in gold. Barring such a situation however, study abroad experiences may not significantly change your application status. This does not mean that you should avoid it however. Studying abroad may well be your most enriching personal experience, and ultimately personal growth is more important in the long term than career growth.

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The Final Word

All of this must be taken in context. Of course there are amazing internships, research projects, and volunteer opportunities available that would shatter this structured hierarchy. And if you come across such an opportunity then I strongly encourage you to take it. What constitutes a great opportunity will vary depending on your career and life goals, but be bold and trust your instincts and these opportunities will reveal themselves to you.